1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for producing documents, e.g. printers, scanners and other such systems. Specifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods for verifying accurate and reliable document production.
2. Description of the Related Art
For many applications, accurate verification of a printed document is essential. Currently, verification is generally performed manually by visually inspecting the document. For certain applications, an automated system for effecting document verification is needed. One such application is the ‘pay to print’ application.
Previously, if one wanted to purchase stamps, a book, tickets to an event (any sort of hard copy output that has an intrinsic value) one would have to travel to a store and purchase the item. Today a person can order these items over the Internet and the vendor will then ship the item to one's address. In the future, people may want to be able to print these valuable documents in their home/office to simplify the purchase process. Vendors may wish to enable this selling option and lower the cost and effort associated with the sale and purchase of their products.
If so, vendors may desire a way of making sure that the purchaser cannot print multiple copies of the product. Customers will require a way of making sure that the printer has successfully printed the purchased item so that it will serve its' intended purpose. For example, a faded printout of a purchased map may not meet the customers requirement, but they may be prevented from printing a second copy. The same would hold for a copy of a new novel, stamps, or tickets to the opera.
Another potential application is that of document scanning. Currently, many documents are being scanned to minimize the physical storage costs associated therewith. Each scanned image should be compared to the original document for verification. As large numbers of documents are typically scanned in each job, the process of verification of each document would be excessively tedious, time consuming and costly if performed manually.
Hence, a need exists in the art for a system and method for automatic document verification. Specifically, a need exists in the art for system and method for automatically verifying printed as well as scanned documents.